Tuesday, October 19, 2010

EYESandFEET.com -- just when Online brand management is becoming overwhelming, this might be a potential lifesaver and great service in social media marketing for business.

WHO IS IT FOR: Local businesses trying to get into the social media game or trying to better manage/maximize their current social media presence.

WHAT DOES IT DO: Presents, in a stunningly clean and graspable interface, just how visible your local competitors are via a Google Maps birdseye view for starters. Drills down to show their brand presence and activity on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Next, it helps you assess and improve your own social marketing. Whooeeee! The competition is under a "SEE" tab and you manage your own profiles under a "DO" tab. Can EYESandFEET come organize my life as cleanly and simply, please?

HOW DOES IT WORK: Sign up is easy. Provide your location and type of business (as of October, 2010, you will benefit most if you are a restaurant in a major city --but this platform looks like it will grow as fast as it can to meet a demand from all sectors and locations and you can try it out whatever/wherever your business.) I signed up for a San Francisco restaurant since Mendocino, my restaurant business location was not yet listed and I wanted the full experience.

Monday, October 18, 2010

RAPPORTIVE is my favorite new tool and in my top ten for 2010. It really got me excited. Simple, brilliant and with an immediate impact on my productivity and efficacity. ReadWriteWeb said: "Fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up".

WHAT IT IS: Rapportive is a free add-on for your browser (so far Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Mailplane...Mailplane? ça alors! another new thing to try) that will immediately replace the ads on the right of your Gmail box with the social profile of your email contact!!!!! Wow.

WHAT IT DOES: For example, a new software company CEO emails me. I see all the public info associated with his email/name on the right side of Gmail: his thumbnail photo, job title, his latest tweets, that he has a profile on Linked In, Facebook, Skype....I can add a private note like "doesn't like lunch meetings".

Is that too cool or what?

Have been using this for a couple of weeks and can't imagine Gmail without it now. You can also see your OWN profile when you hover over your email. For me, this is like having a pocket mirror in your bag.

TIP: hover over any email address in Gmail and Google will round up all the info available on that address and display it for you as well.

FEATURES: Rapportive is just getting going, but you can already do additional useful things like edit your own profile, establish "rapport" with others by quickly connecting to them on their other networks inside your workflow. This is a team of hot developers, it feels like intelligent architecture and methodology. They are listening and let you suggest or vote on improvements and are clearly invested in providing a useful product.

Bravo!

P.S. on the state of your OWN profile, this is very useful for keeping an eye on your own image and how it is appearing to the rest of the world. I caught some my own inane tweets and am actually learning to Tweet better thanks to this pocket mirror.